"Mom! Mom!
Angels all over the house,"
Doug called from the den
making his way toward the kitchen
in a top-speed bee-line run for me.

I was in tune and in time for his exclamatory excited dancing.
"Oh, where are these angels?"

His dance began to bounce,
"Everywhere, everywhere!
On the doors,
sitting in the windows,
on the furniture,
standing around the fireplace,
everywhere, Mama, everywhere!"

Wisely, I thought to myself:
this is one of those important child rearing moments
that I had best not mess up.
My questions spoke to Doug’s oversized blue eyes:
"And just what do these angels look like?"

"MOM! They are big, really, really big!"
"Really big!"
Doug’s arms were stretched as high as he could get them
over his little seven year old body.
"They have curly black hair and they are so big," he continued.

Doug’s excitement did not calm with the telling;
rather he became more animated.
By now my blind to vision eyes squinted into the unseen world
that Doug so clearly viewed.
I sought a glimpse of the angelic convention hold up in my Dallas home.
"What are they wearing?", I asked, still squinting.

"Coats, big long coats."
And they all have on red shoes."
At which point Doug turned and danced off to talk or play
with the big guys in red shoes.
Quietly I whispered to myself, "Red Shoes!"

All this took place in 1969.
It is now 1998 and Doug’s vision comes back to me.
I view from every aspect the heavenly host of angels
bombarding us from every possible sales medium.
We are being trained to accept bad art,
bad sculpture, and bad design.
We are presented winged Barbies
sporting voluptuous white Anglo-Saxon breasts,
hanging over a wasp waist,
draped in poorly designed clothing not suitable for flying.
These angels appear to be the softer side of cat-woman;
not the Supreme Being’s elite warrior guards of all creation.

The limited angelic wardrobe continues to amuse me
when I remember Doug’s unadorned, substantially robed angels.
I figure they possibly wear Banana Republic Out Back Dusters
and those mysterious red shoes are celestial landing gear.

Red shoes?